TheOtherHobbes

The Picard series on Amazon, which he had a big say in, was not great.

It's an actor's job to dramatise our projections, so from that POV he did a legendary job with TNG.

But there's a certain amount of learned skill involved. I know someone who used to work backstage at the Royal Shakespeare Company. She said that she'd all these famous names playing cards backstage, they'd get their call, turn on the juice, stride on stage, say their lines with the appropriate presence and gravitas, then turn the juice off again after the scene and pick up the card game where they left off.

Stewart's choice of roles and support for causes suggests there was more than that involved for him.

He wasn't Picard in real life, but he wasn't just acting either.

As soon as you have an entirely new power structure you have a new government.

Different people may be on top, with different aims (...arguable, but let's pretend.)

But there will always be a government of some sort making the big decisions for the benefit of its ruling clique.

The question conflates education as a social good - unarguable, unless you're an authoritarian and/or a cultist - with the value of college education as a consumer product.

The case for a college education as a product has become less and less convincing as the job market value of credentials has dropped and costs have risen.

I would not assume college in its current form is going to be a thing 20 years from now, except - possibly - as a legacy finishing school for the extremely rich.

Everyone else is going to be scrabbling for income in an economy where a lot of what used to be white collar work is done by AI, and a lot of what used to be blue collar work is done by robots.

The critical skills will be creative independence, improvisation, and systems thinking - the ability to hack the social and financial economy to invent paid work instead of applying for it.

The usual "Governments are evil until I need to be rescued" libertarian shuffle.

It's very easy to pick it up, put it in a car or van, and move it to a different location.

It's much less easy to convert it to something you can actually spend. Even if you can get it to a buyer, they'll always offer you less than you expect/want.

Reputable dealers have KYC reporting duties of their own. Disreputable dealers... may have other ideas.

The entire financial system is a chaotic boundary between thieves and opportunists, and people who want to keep thievery and opportunism under enough control to keep the system nominally workable.

It's always been like this. Which is why financial systems blow up and/or collapse regularly.

It would be possible to split the day into shifts and have the night owls providing services for other night owls.

Medical emergency cover is 24 hours already. Some factories run 24 hours. So do some transport networks.

There would be huge benefits for commuting because traffic would be spread out.

The practical issues have more to do with noise and energy use, not the "social contract."

The argument is there's not much life training for having kids before you start, and even less for dealing with elderly parents.

So a lot of people are blindsided by the reality of either, and both together can be unimaginably difficult.

Aside from cash and life stability issues - both very real - I suspect that one of the reasons for the drop in birth rates is that because of the Internet, more people are seeing what parenting involves before they start.

Previously it was more of a rosy and aspirational "Let's have kids!", now it's "You mean I'll be severely sleep deprived for years?!"

Robots could help with all of this just by doing basic chores and automating daily bureaucracy.

In the best of all possible worlds that would free up more time for personal relationships, which can get very stressed by unavoidable demands that are basically a full-time job.

This seems to be usual. Accountants are liable for crimes like embezzlement, but tax authorities hold individual tax payers responsible. If tax payers want to recover losses they have to go to court, which is often risky because accountants will say the client didn't do A, B, and C.

That doesn't explain why ICE were notorious for rounding up people attending immigration hearings.

Th policy has just been struck down, but we'll see whether that makes a practical difference.

IME ICE are simply a death squad. Immigration is a pretext.

The goal is political terror against regime opponents, not a rational and proportional response to people without paperwork.

The assholes are still there. Complaining about language does nothing to get rid of the assholes. They're completely orthogonal activities.

If you wanted to get rid of the assholes - incredibly difficult, because they take many forms - you'd have to reinvent corporate culture in the US to make it less extractive and performative and more substance-based and cooperative.

How are lower-level workers supposed to influence a crank like Zuckerberg?

He owns the company and all of its decisions. He is literally accountable to no one, from the board down.

The only viable action here is to do what the Brazilian government are going to do - document the abuses, and fine the company into oblivion and/or ban it if it doesn't behave itself.

If the US ever recovers democracy itself, pass the documentation on to the new US government.

As long as it's not running PHP you should be fine.

He's responsible for the iPhone, and effortless touch screen pocket computing has been culturally and psychologically catastrophic.

That's not his fault specifically, and it's possible someone else would have invented the same tech eventually.

But he had a gift for sawing the hard edges off tech and making it palatable. Adtech and social media both took full advantage of that, and there's no evidence he saw that as a problem.